“We were in school at the time and they made the announcement that he’d been shot,” said Larry Alvarado, who was a student at Centennial High School on Nov. 22, 1963. “Then they made an announcement that school would be dismissed and a lot of us just went across the street to Sacred Heart (Cathedral) to pray.”

Rose Ahlers was 6 at the time of the shooting and the announcement came over the speakers while she and her mother were shopping for groceries.

“Just about everyone in the store got down on their knees and began praying,” said Ahlers, who was living in Colorado Springs at the time. “I had not ever seen an adult cry, but that afternoon, men and women were sobbing out loud.”

Ahlers said her family was glued to the television through the weekend and on Saturday went to the church and prayed again.

“In the ’60s, that’s what you did during a crisis,” she said.

The event became a topic of conversation at her school the next week. Ahlers said she remembered asking her teacher lots of “why” questions but doesn’t remember any of the answers.

“Fifty years later, I still wonder why,” she said.

Robert E. Martinez was working at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo when he heard the dreadful news.

“At first, no one knew what was happening,” Martinez said. “We were all trying to get to a radio because there weren’t many televisions.”

Martinez, who was a psychiatric technician, said the mental health patients, much to his dismay, took the news very hard.

“They were shocked, too. I didn’t realize they loved the president so much,” he said.

“We all were sad and shocked at the same time.”

Don Hammerstrom was a freshman at Alamosa High School and that weekend was the Sadie Hawkins dance.

When the announcement came, everybody was “dead silent,” Hammerstrom said.

He said the association with the Sadie Hawkins dance was enough to prevent him from participating in any others.

“It was a real shock to me and other members of my generation,” Hammerstrom said.

Loretta Stevens-Bailey was 21 at the time and gathered with five generations of her family for her grandfather’s funeral when word came that Kennedy had been shot.

Stevens-Bailey said she remembered her grandmother saying that she understood how Jacqueline Kennedy felt and that it “seemed like it’s going to be so very, very lonely.”